2. William Garden² Blaikie (James¹) was born 1820. William died 11/06/1899 at 78 years of age.

From The Times, June 12, 1899

The Rev. William Garden Blaikie, D.D., LL.D., late professor of homiletics and pastoral theology in the Free Church New College, Edinburgh, died yesterday morning at North Berwick, where for some time past he had been suffering from severe illness. Born in 1820, the son of Mr. James Blaikie, at one time Lord Provost of Aberdeen, he was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and University, and graduated M.A. after a promising career as a student at the age of 17 years. In 1842 he was ordained to the charge of Drumblade, but in 1843, when the Disruption took place, he left the Church of Scotland, and finally settled in a charge at Pilrig, Edinburgh, where for 24 years he faithfully discharged the duties of a minister and busied himself with the welfare of a large-working class population around his church, delivering lectures to working men on which he afterwards based his "Better Days for Working People", now in its 80th thousand, and instituting many schemes of social reform. In 1868 he received his professorship, which he held till 1897. In 1892, the year preceeding the jubiliee of the Free Church, Professor Blaikie was fittingly chosen as Moderator of the General Assembly, and from 1888 to 1892 he acted as president of the Pan-Presbyterian Alliance. During his long service in the Free Church he acted in many capacities. He was a member of several committees, including the Continental, the Temperance, the Church Extension, and the Home Missions Committees, and he edited for a number of years the Free Church Magazine, the North British Review, the Sunday Magazine, and the Catholic Presbyterian. Among the best known of his works, of which there is a long list, is his "Personal Life of David Livingstone." At a recent University function at Aberdeen it was stated that Dr. Blaikie was the oldest living graduate of the University.

William Garden Blaikie had the following child:

+ 4 i. James Andrew³ Blaikie was born c1845.

William Garden Blaikie and Catherine Biggar had the following child:

5 ii. Walter Biggar Blaikie was born 23/11/1847. Walter died 3/05/1928 in Edinburgh, at 80 years of age. He married Janet Marshall Macfie 1873. Janet was born c1852. Janet was the daughter of John Macfie. Janet died 30/06/1942 in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, at 89 years of age. .

From The Times, May 5, 1928

Dr. W. B. Blaikie, scholar, historian, printer, and man of affairs, died on Thursday at a nursing home in Edinburgh, at the age of 80.

Walter Biggar Blaikie sprang from an old Border family which had migrated to Aberdeen, where his paternal grandfather was a noted Provost. His father, Professor William Garden Blaikie, was one of the 474 ministers of the Church of Scotland who signed the deed of demission at the time of the Disruption, was chosen as Moderator of the General Assembly of the new Free Church, and became a well-known writer, of whose books "The Personal Life of Dr. Livingstone" is perhaps the best remembered. Walter Blaikie was born on November 23, 1847, and his nurse was the Alison Cunningham who, in May, 1852, went on to another baby, Robert Louis Stevenson, and became his beloved "Cummy", his second mother, "The Angel of my infant life". Not many days before her death in July, 1913, learning that Blaikie had been chosen to receive the honorary degree of LL.D. from Edinburgh University, she sent him, in her own firm handwriting, a characteristic letter of motherly affection. She lived to see the books which made one of her boys famous printed by the other in the Edinburgh edition. Another link between them was their common friendship with W. E. Henley.

Like Stevenson, Blaikie began by studying engineering. He was educated at Edinburgh Academy and University and in Brussels and went to India in 1870, serving in the military branch of the Public Works Department. Retiring as an executive engineer of military works in 1878, he returned to Scotland, and in 1878, he returned to Scotland, and in 1879, entered the service of the famous printing firm of T. and A. Constable, over whose business he continued to preside for 40 years. The beautiful productions of the firm owed much to his taste and expert technical knowledge; he was indeed the "artist painter" to whom Henley dedicated his "Lyra Heroica".

But though Blaikie's life's work lay in printing, to the scholarly side of which he devoted special attention, he was nothing if not many-sided, and won distinction in many other fields. In Scottish history, for example, he was reputed to know more of the Jacobite period than any authority of his time after the death of Andrew Lang, and to the elucidatoin of this subject he made valuable contributions in the shape of an "Itinerary of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, 1745 and 1746", "Origins of The Forty-five", "Edinburgh at the time of Prince Charles Edward's Occupation", and "Jacobite Perthshire", the last-named taking the form of five articles contributed to Lady Tullibardine's (Duchess of Atholl's) military history of the county. His wanderings in the Highlands and Western Isles on the track of Prince Charlie aroused his interest in the old Celtic literature and traditions, and for their collection and preservation he founded the Celtic Review.

More important was the part he took, in conjunction with the late Mr. Fitzroy Bell, in founding the Scots Observer, which had "R.L.S.", "Hugh Haliburton", and J. M. Barrie, then but little known, among its original contributors, and to which Blaikie was personally responsible for bringing Henley to Edinburgh as editor. He was a good classical scholar, and wrote accomplished Latin verses. Astronomy also engaged his attention; his chief contribution to that science was an annual series of monthly star-maps, which he began in 1898 and continued without interruption till 1920. In addition, he was one of Edinburgh's leading men of affairs. To mention only the chief of his public offices, he was one of the founders of the Scottish Geographical Society, a past chairman of the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, a member of the Council of Old Edinburgh Club, of which he was for five years president, a pillar of the Royal Infirmary, and, by no means least, a member of the Territorial Force Association from its inception, and chairman of the Recruiting Committee, for which he did yeoman service from the outbreak of the War.

With so many intellectual irons in the fire, it will scarcely be supposed that Blaikie was a "deacon" of any one of his crafts, except printing and Jacobite history, and none was more ready, in a general way, to acknowledge this than himself. Yet, on specific occasions, he was far from lacking self-confidence and was even prone to a little impatient of opposition. He had what is perhaps the next thing to originality, namely, the power of instantly recognizing and hailing its manifestations in others, as was shown by the eager support he gave to Lang's views on the Forty-five, to Henley's views on the poet Burns, and to the views of the author of "The House with the Green Shutters" on the Kailyard school of fiction. But it remains that his was a quite exceptionally well-filled and useful life, and that he made the most of the unusually large number of talents and aptitudes with which Nature had endowed him.

Dr. Blaikie married in 1873 Janet Marshall, daughter of John Macfie, of Edinburgh, and had five daughters.

There will be a service in St. Cuthbert's Church, Edinburgh, on Monday at 3.15.

Eminent Edinburgh painter, and author of "Itinerary of Prince Charles Edward."

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